Monday, April 06, 2015

This moral panic will pass

…Kidnapping by strangers is wildly uncommon; in New York State, for instance, the Division of Criminal Justice Services announced that 20,309 children were reported missing statewide in 2011; exactly one of those children was confirmed abducted by a stranger. Most — 94 percent — were runaways, most of them teenagers. ...

Free range being what used to be called normal parenting as far back as the 1980s. Looking at the statistics above this is a clear case of moral panic. It will abate. Too many cultural forces, from overtaxed working mothers to libertarians and Christian parents’ rights sorts, object to the dominant ethos.

Khan was hired as a part-time opinion columnist for the NY Times, but then fired when some liberals complained that some of his articles on genetics were not quite politically correct.

Rolling Stone magazine retracted its article about a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity after the release of a report on Sunday ...

No, there was no rape of any kind. A girl was catfishing a fellow student she wanted as a boyfriend.

“Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim,” Mr. Woods, the article’s editor, said in the report. ...

Ms. Erdely, Mr. Wenner said, “was willing to go too far in her effort to try and protect a victim of apparently a horrible crime. She dropped her journalistic training, scruples and rules and convinced Sean to do the same. There is this series of falling dominoes.”

No, Jackie was not a victim. The only victims were the students and fraternities who were falsely accused. Also:

Teresa A. Sullivan, the president of the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, issued a statement late Sunday.

“Rolling Stone’s story, ‘A Rape on Campus,’ did nothing to combat sexual violence, and it damaged serious efforts to address the issue. Irresponsible journalism unjustly damaged the reputations of many innocent individuals and the University of Virginia.

Sullivan was a chief offender, as she punished the fraternity in spite of overwhelming evidence that nearly everything the article said about the fraternity was false. Erdely and Sullivan are not even apologizing to those they falsely accused.

Sailer is all over this story. These stories pretend that the problem was just that the details were not verified according to journalistic standards. No one wants to admit that the whole thing was a hoax. The accused rapist, Haven Monahan, does not even exist. The fraternity was not even having a party. Erdely and Sullivan are not being fired.

One person who shouldn’t get off the hook here is UVA President Teresa Sullivan. She essentially found the fraternity guilty based on a story in a music tabloid. She could have told the University community that “we don’t convict people based on stories in the media,” that she was going to independently investigate the accusations, and that people named in tabloid stories should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty in the American tradition. She did no such thing. She hastily imposed a group punishment on the entire Greek system, and pretty much stood by while angry crowds mobbed and vandalized the fraternity house. (Faculty members didn’t help by staging their own marches; they may want — especially now — to characterize those marches as “anti-rape” or “pro-woman,” but there’s no getting around the fact that they were perceived at the time, and probably meant, as targeting the accused. In this case, the falsely accused.) As I’ve said before, there’s no place in America today where the authorities are more likely to be found siding with (or at least enabling) a lynch mob than on a university campus, and that’s a disgrace. ...

“Sullivan, in her statement Sunday, made no apology to those fraternity members she treated as guilty without evidence.”

Also the Erdely and the Rolling Stone seem pretty adamant about not apologizing to the falsely accused. In spite of everything, Erdely still claims that something bad happened to Jackie that night.

This is disgusting. I am waiting for anyone in the major news media to say the obvious -- that this story was a hoax, that it was wildly implausible, that almost every checkable assertion turned out to be false, that the main perp turned out to be a fictional character invented to make another boy jealous, that Jackie is unlikely to have even ever set foot in the fraternity, and that nothing in this story shows any true evidence of a rape culture at UVa.

I am struggling to come to terms with this new reality wherein sticking to an objective view of the facts is considered a conservative trait. The campus left’s complete unwillingness to adjust their opinions of these cases to fit with the facts shows a thought process completely devoid of reason.

It got me thinking about the whole UVA case and the lies that the reporter so easily swallowed from “Jackie,” the woman who was supposedly raped. There is a lot of controversy surrounding the Rolling Stone Magazine article and the facts are being picked apart but that is not the real story. The real story is that liberal rags like the Rolling Stone mag, the liberal media, and liberal politicians in general are so used to getting away with lies, exaggeration, and twisting the facts to suit their agenda that they don’t even bother to conceal it anymore (if they ever did is perhaps debatable).